lunes, 4 de mayo de 2015

The firefighters' workout

A workout designed to help firefighters stay heart-healthy focuses on functional fitness exercises like stair climbing. Here’s how members of the New Brunswick, N.J., fire department stay fit.

Self-study activity:
Watch the video and say whether the statements below are true or false.

1 A firefighter's day is unpredictable.
2 40 to 50% of firefighters die as a result of exposure to fumes.
3 Fire, fire, fire fitness provides training programmes for New York firefighters.4 The gear firefighters have to carry weighs 60 to 70 kilos.5 Functional fitness training is a new trend in American fitness craze.6 The pales the firefighters are carrying in the exercise weigh 32 gallons.7 The stress level for a firefighter is very high.

Living a day as a firefighter would probably blow a lot of Americans’ minds. We live together, we eat together, and now we work out together. One of the things I love about this job is that I never know what’s going to happen.

Forty to fifty per cent of firefighters that are killed in the line of duty have been of heart attacks. Trying to get that number reduced is really our mission. Fire, fire, fire fitness is a firefighter funded charity. We started out as a Facebook page just providing free workout to firefighters across the country.

The workout that we did today was a four men style workout. We took a high-rise pack or a hotel pack and one man will shoulder that and he will run upstairs. Our turn out gear weighs anywhere between sixty and seventy pounds, so having a little bit of extra weight on you when you’re doing stairs just conditions your body to utilize those muscles.

Functional fitness training is kind of the newer trend in the American fitness craze and it just works out great for our type of job because it involves full body movements, you know, there’s no bicep curl at a fire ground, you’re always depending on each other and you’re all suffering together and that camaraderie is perfect for the fire service.

And we’ll go from the staircase run over to the battling ropes, except we don’t use rope, we use inch-three quarter fire hose, and that’s basically a core gaser. It works every muscle in your body, even those you didn’t know you had.

When you’ve left that, we went over to do your traditional firebox jump but instead of using a box we use the back bumper of the fire engine. The guys can tailor that, so if they’re not very good at jumping they will just do step-ups, and that’s another great thing with the functional fitness style workout is that we can scale every exercise.

After you’ve finished your box jump, you move on to our farmer’s carry. We were using 32-gallon foam pales, so it’s really challenging your grip strength for when we’re carrying ladders or even if you’re dragging out a victim, that grip strength comes in key.

The stress level of our job is super high with some of the things we see and do, and after a grueling workout like that together we just feel better.